American Go E-Journal » Go Spotting

Go drives the plotline in a second-season episode of JAG entitled “The Game of Go.” “Harm and a Colombian drug lord play a high-stakes game of go, with the prize being a Marine who was left behind during a covert mission, as Webb and the JAG team once again butt heads,“ reports Dave Holland.

“My recollection of the episode is that several moves were spread out over the unfolding of the plot with closeups of the contested part of the board. It represented middle game fighting. A little far-fetched for a US Navy lawyer and a drug kingpin to be such accomplished players but good exposure for the game nevertheless.“ Note that the moves are played inside the board squares rather than on the intersections.

“I enjoy the EJ’s ‘Go Spotting’ column as go has a way of showing up in unexpected places,” says Holland. “I live in Minneapolis and recently met a young player from northern Minnesota whose grandfather learned baduk during the Korean War. He also went to high school with Bob Dylan.“

“I taught one of my best lessons ever this morning,” wrote Stephen Brivati recently on the violinist.com blog. “When this nice thing happens, I always try to figure out why. When playing Go, the greatest intellectual challenge in my life after the cat, one has to do things in the correct order or get slaughtered. Both teaching and practicing the violin are the same: you have to make real-time decisions about what to work on that is appropriate for that time and place and student. Get the wrong order, and the value of the lesson or practice diminishes significantly.”– Thanks to Justin Teng for sending this in, his dad plays violin and follows this blog.

’42 Ozu Film: In the 1942 movie There Was a Father (“Chichi ariki”), directed by Ozu Yasujiro, “There are views of a go parlor at minute 35, then further mention of the game later,” reports Bob Barber.

For more about go on film, check out the European Go Federation’s Go Filmography.

Former AGA Board Chair David Weimer tipped us off about a forthcoming book with a go-themed cover. International Relations Theory, The Game-Theoretic Approach is by Andrew H. Kydd, a colleague of Weimer’s in the Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, WI. “Written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, this is the first textbook on international relations theory to take a specifically game theoretic approach to the subject,” according to the book’s description on the Cambridge University Press website. “International relations theory is presented and analysed using simple games, which allow students to grasp the concepts and mechanisms involved with the rationalist approach without the distraction of complicated math.” The book is due out in March.

Go makes an appearance in the Netflix series “Borgia,” which is not to be confused with the similar series “The Borgias.” In the 29th minute of the third episode (“1497”) of the third season, Cesare Borgia , the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492-1503), uses “the game of strategy from the Orient, go,” to give a plan for his conquest of northern Italian states. He uses a thick go board with legs and colored glass beads to demonstrate his point. “The goal is to add as few men as possible; out-thinking your opponent rather than out-fighting him.” The winner does not eradicate his opponent, but rather entices him to surrender.– Ted Terpstra, based on a tip from Mark Gilston

In his 2013 “A New Equation For Intelligence” TED Talk, Alex Wissner-Gross uses go to demonstrate his thesis that there is a single equation for intelligence. Drawing on the fact that computer game playing has improved to the point that in 1997 the computer beat the world chess champion and in the last decade computers have made significant progress in playing go, Wissner-Gross postulates that intelligence is a “physical force that resists future confinement.”– Ted Terpstra, with thanks to Arnold Eudell and Joshua Guarino. We also covered this in a February 8, 2014 post.

San Diego Go Club President Ted Terpstra has been seeing go everywhere lately. On senet, an Egyptian board game that’s older than go by 3,000 years, but lost for millennia before being reborn, “‘GO’ can be seen in a couple of places on the side of the board,” he writes. A recent New Yorker cover “that at first glance seemed to have many white go stones scattered in it,” turned out to be raindrops on a taxi window as it approaches the Empire State Building, which Terpstra points out “is near the 2014 Go Congress site.” The UCSD Go Club combined with the San Diego Go Club to sponsor Go Night at UCSD on Saturday, November 8. Japanese language students turned out to learn go at a Study Abroad event. Twenty student showed up for the beginners class and although it was supposed to end at 8:30 p.m., “the students kept playing until they were thrown out at 10 p.m.,” says Terpstra.

The Internet is filled with cats, so Steve Colburn wasn’t too surprised to come across this piece by Tango that combines cats and go. “The tumblr this came off of has a lot of fun images for simple perspective and jokes,” Colburn adds.

This oil painting depicting a go game between a young Korean girl and an older western man is featured in an October 31 ArtNet News report about North Korea’s Mansudae Art Studio. Perhaps the world’s biggest art factory, “It employs around 4,000 laborers of which under a quarter are artists who mostly graduated from the Pyongyang University of Fine Arts. The studio churns out propaganda for the Kim family leadership, producing everything from trinkets to murals and gigantic Soviet-style monuments.” This piece, entitled “Confrontation” is by Kim Hyon Myong.

In the game Destiny once you hit Level 5 you can buy “Snakeline 4.5 gauntlets,” which are “tough, menacing, and I swear- make you unbeatable at Go.” Thanks to Michael Albert for passing this along, though he doesn’t say whether the gauntlets have actually made his go invincible.